Children’s Week

Ever since I got that letter from my mother a couple weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about the old days in Nagrand. Like I’ve mentioned a few times already, I used to keep a journal back then. About a week ago, before I left for Nagrand, I pulled it out again, and I’ve been paging through now and then.

I don’t know if any of you have had the experience, but it’s funny reading things you wrote so long ago that you don’t even remember writing them. It’s like this weird ping pong game between “Oh crap, I wrote that? Was I ever really that stupid?” and “Hey, that sounds really smart, who wrote that?” I know, I know, I shouldn’t be all that surprised by that second one. Modesty is the burden of the preternaturally awesome.

Anyhow, I’ve been reading through those very first entries in particular. It wasn’t even really a journal at that point so much as a notebook I used to fill up with all kinds of stuff – drawings, my early half-assed attempts at poems, stories about things that had happened to me or that I just plain invented… I guess Greatmother Geyah and my mother both thought I had this creative side, so they figured they’d give me some notebooks to try to encourage me.

(Side note, you should totally see some of these cartoony little-kid pictures I drew of Jorin Deadeye, with like “POOP HEAD” written in and arrows pointing to him.)

I’ve been coming back to a few passages I’d written about my mom. Reading me stories (thinking back, that’s probably what got me started writing in the first place, all the nights she read me to sleep), like that rhyming kids’ book Talbuk Luck, kind of an old standard for Draenor kids back then. She even did this goofy sing-song voice for Tahri the Talbuk – I’d forgotten all about that until I started reading back over this stuff. Or the time later on when she took me on that long trip on foot out by Oshu’gun, and sat on one of the bluffs to watch Bach’lor running around in the fields with his herd.

The little-kid entries come to a stop all of a sudden, and don’t pick up again until I started writing again in my teens. And, oh boy, here comes the emo. But, yeah, the gap. Kicked in right about the point when she died. “Died”? Should I put that in quotation marks now? Anyway. Disappeared. Any desire to look at those notebooks went with her, for a long time.

Yesterday afternoon, Lakkara went out to go exploring Orgrimmar. I’d been showing her around, but I’m sure a lot of it was just this big blur of information, and she seemed pretty blown away by the place in general. No surprise – the city is gigantic compared to villages like Garadar that she’s used to, and even Shattrath doesn’t come across quite so vast and, well, overwhelming. So she wanted to have a little time to just look around at her own pace. Reasonable enough.

After a while when she hadn’t come back, I figured I’d go have a look around. As big and sprawling as Orgrimmar is, it’s pretty easy to get turned around even if you know the place, much less if you’re still new to it all. It took a while, and no small amount of circling around, but I finally tracked her down. In retrospect, I should have known where she’d be right off, considering what week it is.

I found her in the Orgrimmar orphanage. It was starting to get dark, and she and Matron Battlewail had the kids gathered around…while she read to them. Talbuk Luck. Of course. She was even doing her goofy Tahri the Talbuk voice, which was cracking this little troll girl up especially. She read through to the end, this silly sing-song rhyming story, and when she finished, Gurtash hopped up and shouted “Epic verse!”

Nobody noticed me when I first got there, so I just hung back and watched in the doorway, then headed back to Grommash Hold.

Tomorrow I’m sending out new orders to some of our field commanders. We’ve lost a lot of soldiers over the last year or so – in Vashj’ir, in Twilight Highlands, in Deepholm… Most of the time we recover the bodies and bring them home, give the fallen the burial they deserve. Sometimes, though, there’s no body found. People just disappear. And after a while, they wind up on the rolls of the dead.

Since Deathwing was defeated, things have been relatively quiet on most fronts. So I think we can spare the personnel to take on a few extra missions. I’m having the field commanders send out some additional patrols, an extra scouting party here and there, to make another sweep or two in the areas where we’ve taken those losses. In particular, the places where we’ve had people disappear, presumed dead but never confirmed beyond a doubt. The ones, especially, who’d left children behind. Just in case.

I’m not going to advertise it, and I’m sure not going to let them know at the orphanage and risk getting the kids’ hopes up. Life is hard enough, and cruel enough, which the orphans know better than anyone, without me setting them up for more disappointment. But who knows. Maybe there’s still some good news for one or two of them, out there waiting to be brought home. Doesn’t hurt to have a look.

Every once in a while – not often, but sometimes – life decides to be generous.